This will be longer and more personal than most of my posts so far. It’s also less focused. I’m rambling a bit. This is not my metaphor and I also don’t think it’s the metaphor of the teacher in whose book I read it, though I am using my words and phrasing. I’ve seen similar things elsewhere. You are walking through life carrying a big rock. You don’t like carrying the rock, but you take it with you everywhere you go. You complain about taking this damn rock with you everywhere you go, but you also don’t stop carrying it. You carry it for years. Maybe someone tells you that you could just drop it or maybe the idea comes to you on your own. You think “But this rock is all I’ve got and people know me when they see me with it”. After years of carrying it, one day it’s finally too heavy. You can’t get anywhere trying to carry this rock with you everywhere. You finally drop it and you feel an enormous sense of relief.
I was one of those dudes who spent his teens and twenties thinking I was “rational”. I was a vocal, probably at times, annoying atheist. I was the mirror image, as an almost evangelical atheist, of the people I hated most, thought were the worst people I ever encountered: evangelical Christians. I think I was well into my 30s before I softened that to agnostic. And then, years into meditating, I let that rock go. It was a little weird and uncomfortable, but it had become easier to let that rock go than to keep carrying it. My inclination became a belief that whether a god existed or not was unknowable, so irrelevant to me. People can believe “whatever gives them meaning and comfort and it would be really preferable if they could do that without hurting others” was where I sat for a long time.
As my meditation practiced has deepened in the last year, I feel like I’ve had some real insight into the nature of suffering and the path toward its cessation, perhaps really into the nature of reality. These are far beyond the sudden revelatory bursts that came on meditation retreats. They aren’t “Eureka!” moments. They are a slow, steady erosion of much of how I felt about life from watching my own thoughts, actions, patterns, and those of other people. There are a lot of aspects of how I have navigated the world that feel outdated to me. It’s not that they weren’t or aren’t genuine. It’s more that I can see how I was rewarded, ignored, or punished for being certain ways in the world and that I developed habits of mind that resulted from that. Those habits of mind, even when they aren’t bothering me or hurting anyone else, even when they might be the personality traits that people love about me, aren’t skillful in the sense that they don’t help me down this path that I’m trying to walk. In conversation, people often think I’m funny. At some point in my childhood when I figured that out, perhaps subconsciously at first, I trained my brain to make jokes, to the point where it was hard for much of my life not to make jokes. I joked with some friends in the 2010s that I was “compulsively funny”, and that I “couldn’t not make the jokes”. But always making jokes also sometimes makes it hard to appear sincere. I say things that might be mean or divisive because they are funny, even if I mostly do that in ways that were consistent with my values. I make jokes even when I intend to be serious. And that’s just one personality trait I’m using as an example. There are many others. That mind machine does its thing.
In my case, when I’ve had more than just peeks at seeing outside of the ego, when I’ve had sustained bits of being able to see the mind do what the mind does from the perspective of the watcher of that mind, I can see how empty it is, how it is all just conditioned response. If you get very far at all into Buddhism, you’re taught that it is clinging and craving that cause suffering. It’s easy enough to understand “I want X and trying to get X creates discomfort or even misery because maybe I can’t have X or because, like everything else, X is always changing”, and to see how that causes suffering for yourself or for other people who experience the behavior you exhibited trying to get or keep X. It’s easy to want to be free from suffering, even if it’s hard to figure out how. When everything that most people do is just conditioned response, you get so much suffering. Even when you get what you want, you can’t keep it. It’ll change or you’ll change, or your relationship to it will change in ways that make having it cause suffering, even if it’s suffering you can live with. It’s the same for the things we don’t want. When you’re averse to something, having that something thrust into your life causes you to suffer. The way that you act to avoid or be rid of those things you’re averse to will make other people react in ways that make them suffer.
Intellectually and experientially, I can see that it is the having of preferences that causes suffering. Even the mildest ‘wanting to be happy’ or ‘wanting not to suffer’ are preferences. But so is an aversion to having preferences. Becoming aloof, detached, and disengaged from life is not a cessation of suffering. Living life with full engagement, in the moment, and accepting it just as it is, seems to be the way, even if I struggle to find the right words to say that with the profundity and clarity it deserves. It’s all rocks. How many of them can I drop before I’m no longer carrying any load?